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New submitter Tailhook writes: "Linux Mint 17 'Qiana', a long term support edition of Linux Mint, has been released. Mint 17 is available in both MATE and Cinnamon editions. Mint 17 is derived from Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty Tahr) and will receive security updates until April, 2019. The Cinnamon edition provides Cinnamon 2.2, with a much improved update manager, driver manager, HiDPI display support and many usability refinements. This release of Mint establishes a baseline on which the next several releases will be based: 'Until 2016 the development team won't start working on a new base and will be fully focused on this one; future versions of Linux Mint will use the same package base as Linux Mint 17, making it trivial for people to upgrade.'"

I've booted Live CDs of both flavours of Linux Mint and I have nothing against Linux Mint. I just haven't made a decision for what is better and imagine I'd be able to use both Unity and Gnome 3 shell if I tried it out enough / bothered learning how to use them. I would likely end up using Gnome 3 of the four though Cinnemon, MATE and LXDE and such will of course be familiar from the beginning.

In thoose days I used to let the laptop on for the entire week.. and was not a problem. But then.... well we all have an idea, I needed two or three reboots per week because the sistem thrashed a lot of memory.. tried alternatives, kubuntu, xubuntu, but they all lack stability.

MATE is a simple, neat destop that... "just works". I'm just old fashoined and don't need a fancy UI.

MATE is a simple, neat destop that... "just works". I'm just old fashoined and don't need a fancy UI.

Using Xubuntu here for that same reason. Not to mention the fact that I have a lesser machine (an eMachines EL1358G) with not quite enough RAM to run full-on Ubuntu. Canonical seems to have done some nice things with its spin of XFCE used here.

For a major update to this distro it is. Mint is the reasonable middle ground in a sea of partisan battles and "UX" disasters. The past couple of years has seen Shuttleworth slam Ubuntu's rudder over to starboard with Unity as the ONE-true-way, then MS followed suit with Metro as the MORE-ONE-true bastard child of Unity and IOS, and Gnome passed the Jonestown kool-aid with Gnome3 as the ONEST-true-way. I've lost count of the number of major companies and orgs that decided to shove their half-baked ideas into production; usability and feedback be damned.

By contrast, Mint's "Mr Neutral" Clem provided support for a variety of GUIs while focusing on the underlying stability and functionality of the OS. Remember way back when Gates derided the notion of an OS that just improved stability and performance without introducing a slew of new features? He said Microsoft would never do that, and this was a dumb idea. Well, Clem did the reasonable thing -- he and the team worked on stability ad performance... with a *choice* of new UI features. Take it leave it, love it or hate it, you can't deny that Mint gives you tons of operational/UI choice while resolving much of the technical bustedness that has been a weak spot for Linux acceptance.

I'm typing this on a fully configured Mint 17 system. I booted from a live USB drive at 8:38pm, and the install from bare metal was complete by 8:44. Connected to the wifi and had all updates pulled and installed by 8:55pm. A few quick tweaks that any newbie could do, and I'm up and running with a fully current system, office suite, media tools, with tunes playing in the background, and *everything* just works -- in about 20 minutes. (I played with it over the weekend on a bench full of systems, and have yet to find a recent HP, Lenovo, or Dell not fully supported.) With Mint I get the "just works" simplicity of OSX with the ass-kicking power of Linux, and in another 20min I'll have Wine installed with my genuine copy of MS Office (Visio if nothing else). And I still have the linux-just-rocks no-click configuration of my office scanner without downloading the 350mb driver package for Windows. Mint is happiness for total luddites who want stuff to look like WIn95, while maintaining compatibility and app-management consistency with faux-modern-minimalists who want the UI to look like an empty white room. Take your pick... it just works. I actually *enjoy* using Mint.... and so do the less-geeky people who just want to click and do stuff.

Which all sounds very exciting until you realize that doesn't really mean anything significant. Let's face it, once you've launched your programs you really don't care about the underlying OS so if it has a funny launcher it's no big deal - normal people dont care about the OS, it is there to run their applications and once you're in Counterstrike or WoW or Photoshop or AutoCAD or Maya or Premiere or MS Office or LibreOffice or iWork or Firefox the OS it is running on is pretty much irrelevant.

Well.... if the apps on your system actively hide the flaws of your OS that may be true. The reason why IDEs and all-encompasing single window programs are so popular in general is because they hide how bad the Windows shell is. Windows is playing no part in "just getting out of the way." It is being quietly swept under a rug.
No one wants to interact with Windows on windows. Best to just maximize everything and use the taskbar.

To be honest, most of the problems with Windows Shell have been slavishly copied by the Linux window managers. Being able to click without raising windows disappeared years ago, and along with that any ability to actually use overlapping windows. Lots of other bad stuff also copied "because it is user friendly" but that is the big one.

What I want is to be able to push a button in one application (or select text) and not have it raise above the other application. I also want to eventually raise that first application (perhaps by clicking the title bar). "layers" does not do this, and in fact "layers" are a very very bad idea.

This is finally causing serious problems with drag & drop (as you cannot drag from a window without it raising) so they are finally starting to get a clue. Unfortunately I am seeing the "windo

"normal people don't care about the OS". So? Why are you even bringing up "norms"? They don't come here, they don't know how to spell "OS", and don't know that a good OS can keep everything working like a fine watch... or keep crashing your all-important app. You sound like a "norm" that's stumbled in here, and trying to sound "technical".

***Exactly. And with that in mind, since we left the 90's it has been really hard to find a good program launcher that isn't incredibly bloaty and that doesn't hinder my workflow.***

Exactly this. It's the same for me. I'm not necesarilly married to the "Win95" paradigm, but if I'm going to dump it, I expect the replacement to enhance my daily workflow, not drive me up the wall with distracting and context breaking view switches.

It may be the modern thing on mobile phones, but there it is not a matter of innovation, but of working around restraints of the (still) limited mobile hardware.

I don't want to be "that guy", but can LibreOffice Draw act as a reasonable substitute to Visio? Apart from the benefit of being a native app, it seems to load up Visio documents fine and has all the same functionality, at least from my own uses of it. If it's not suitable yet, are you trying to learn it at least so you can transition from Visio to Draw? I only ask because Wine is best used as a transition tool to help in the meantime while one learns to use equivalent native apps; re

Given there's nothing in Linux that's Linux-only which I can't find an equivalent for in Windows, I end up staying with Windows because it supports everything including the edge cases, whereas Linux doesn't

There are a few - I haven't found anything as easy for simple video editing as OpenShot for example. Admittedley this is a niche program for people who want to edit and caption and use a few preset "fades" but don't need to learn to use a full-featured video suite.

Since its Qt based I would have thought that a port would be relatively easy

I genuinely don't know, but it's possible that the issue isn't "get the program to compile on Windows" as much as it's a "get the program to run like an actual Windows application". Har harr, I don't mean 'it crashes every five seconds" or "has a metric ton of DRM" or "litters stuff all over your file system". There are other aspects of a QT application on Windows that go beyond just getting it to compile...

1.) Codec support. Windows users will fully expect files from their devices to get onto a timeline, a

Exactly!
Without viewing the diffs, how would you know which config to choose?
I don't want updates overwriting any of my custom configs. Then you have to spend time setting things back the way you want. By showing the diffs, you get to chosse to keep your config pr let the update re-set it.

I noticed the same benefits using Xubuntu 14.04. A lightweight user interface, very fast and easy to use. The OS is also very fast to install, very fast to boot, everything just works and updating is smooth. It may not be as "fancy" as regular Ubuntu or Mint, but I find Xubuntu very stable and polished (our usage is file and compute servers/clusters, desktops, mostly software development and office work).

It amazes me how self-defeating open source software developers can be in naming their efforts. Mint Mate (mah-teh?) uses a foreign word with more than one foreign pronunciation [wikipedia.org], and a different pronunciation and meaning in English. The name discourages new users.

Mate is a simple to pronounce, unambiguous word for most people. And if people pronounce it wrong, so what? Correct them, or let it go. If you're talking to someone about about a Linux distro, then from the context people are going to know you're not talking about a drink.

Is there a single word which is unambiguously pronounced around the world? My money's on no. Personally I think they should have called it Mint 17 Ghoti, which is of course pronounced "fish".

I remember once hearing that, everywhere that golf is played, it's called golf. I'm not well-traveled enough to be able to confirm, though. Anybody who hasn't spent their entire life in midwest USA care to comment?

It amazes me how self-defeating open source software developers can be in naming their efforts. Mint Mate (mah-teh?) uses a foreign word with more than one foreign pronunciation [wikipedia.org], and a different pronunciation and meaning in English. The name discourages new users.

We really are precious little snowflakes aren't we? I had to go into therapy the first time I saw the word Ubuntu.

Linux will never be successful until we have real American names like Hero OS, or Exceptionalism. Fox news can run contests to come up with the best, proper American names that will fill us all with pride, and finally allow people to come out fearlessly and install the OS.

Any true North American Linux distro would have to be called "Participation Trophy Linux (R)(TM)" and a free CD would be distributed with every box of microwave food and with every package of diabetic test strips.

Once you've got this splendid system up and running you'll soon find that you can't do fully professional image work, you can't do fully professional audio work, etc. etc. etc...

For those, I have my Mac. Unix-like based OS, and it pretty much does what you ask for.

But my other computers are all Linux, and that's just fine. I'm going to have more than one, because I'm surely not going to do photo or video work on a small screen. So everything has OO on it, they are compatible - something MSO never was between OS's, and they all do their thing very well.

Instead of endlessly fucking around with the basic interface (which has had several flavours that have been good enough to use since the 1980s) why don't they write some actual useful, productive, professional quality APPLICATIONS.

That's because the people who make the desktop environments just work on those, rather than building applications. It's the same problem in corporations: once you've hired some people into a team to do X, they need to keep doing X forever, until you finally lay them all off. You

That's because the people who make the desktop environments just work on those, rather than building applications. It's the same problem in corporations: once you've hired some people into a team to do X, they need to keep doing X forever, until you finally lay them all off. You can't just call X "done" and move on to something else, because then some managers will throw a fit because they're no longer relevant.

Desktop environments are not "done", true my desktop might on the surface resemble Win95, but a lot has happened under the hood on system management tools. Yes, a lot of that is happening deep down in a driver stack but very often it involves exposing new functionality or removing old functionality in control panels, system settings, control applets or whatever. That's just boring maintenance work though, the problem is the UI coders want to do something cool and innovative - they're mostly volunteers after

The problem is that, for some odd reason, in American culture, the term "professional" somehow gets equated with "good", "high quality", etc., which that is frequently just not the case, and "amateur" has been equated with "half-assed". In reality, amateurs frequently do much, much better work than professionals, because 1) they have an interest in doing it well, frequently to perfectionist standards, and 2) professionals only care about maximizing profit, so they'll only do a job "go

If I launch a program from the desktop and it exits with an error, can you PLEASE put up a window containing whatever was printed to stderr? It is NOT user-friendly to have nothing to happen. And no, a user is not going to figure this out by "reading the logs".

You still see this behavior on Windows (7, at least, I haven't been on 8). No, I don't want Windows to search the Internet for the solutions (because it always comes back empty), no I don't want a crash report sent to Microsoft, and no, I don't want you to start the "Troubleshooter" because that is the least useful thing of all.

The long term support version of Linux Mint is indeed newsworthy. I think it is the upcoming popular Linux for the desktop. Why? Because it works, without any unnecessary fancy stuff.

In fact, I would recommend it to anyone who wants to upgrade an old WinXP computer to something more 2014. From experience I can say that installation is really easy, and it will allow you to go online, email, watch movies, listen music or write any documents/excel sheets just like XP did.

Linux Mint has received the most hits of any distro over at DistroWatch [distrowatch.org] for the past 2.5 years or so, after it surpassed Ubuntu.

There's no way to get hard numbers on this sort of stuff, but Mint has already been one of the most popular Linux desktop distros for years, and some have claimed (based on DistroWatch and other sites with hit counts) that it has been #1 (or close to it) for a few years already.

I'm sure others will chime in here with some other data, but my anecdotal evidence is that I know four friends who switched to Linux in the past couple years. While I'm sure I talked about Linux with them, I wasn't involved in their decision, and I don't think any of them had a lot of guidance from other friends about which distro to go with... they just wanted to try Linux. And all four have ended up using Mint. Some checked out Ubuntu but didn't like it, or read articles saying Mint was better, so they decided to try Mint instead.

Again, I'm not claiming this is hard proof of anything. But there's been a lot of buzz around Mint, and it clearly has had enough positive press to pull in some of my friends who were looking to try Linux.

In fact, I would recommend it to anyone who wants to upgrade an old WinXP computer to something more 2014.

Agreed. Even 5 years ago, I would NOT have recommended desktop Linux as a serious replacement, unless the person had some family member or friend who could be "tech support" when something weird went wrong and the fix required editing a bunch of text files on the command line. I certainly wouldn't recommend any inexperienced users try to install it by themselves, unless they were technologically savvy and had some command line experience. (Someone might get lucky, though, and get a system working immediately with no tweaking.)

But today? It may not be the perennial "Year of the Linux desktop," but we do finally have things that "just work" in many more user cases than ever before. I hopped from distro to distro for years, trying to find something I didn't have to tinker with all the time or worry whether multimedia would randomly not work or whether an upgrade would break half of the things I spent hours fixing for last upgrade. Linux Mint was the first to approach a relatively stable "just works" philosophy for the casual desktop user.

I even installed it on an older useless underpowered laptop for a clueless family member over the holidays (Windows had slowed the point that it wasn't useful, and they were tired of Windows). I didn't make any special tweaks other than putting a few shortcuts on the desktop. I knew I only see these people over the holidays, so I wouldn't be around for random tech support. But I wasn't concerned because they had basically just stopped using this computer, so the worst case scenario was that it remained useless. Recently, I heard it was still working great... and if Mint can survive as a useful system for 6 months on the machine of a clueless relative who never used Linux before, well, I'd say that's an achievement.

I figured that to be the case between KDE Mint 15 and 16, having come from Kubuntu. The Mint folks actively discourage upgrading and encourage fresh installs. Turns out they mean it. dist-upgrade did not work for me as it has for the past umpteen years with Kubuntu. That's one of a few reasons I'm switching back to Kubuntu.

Unless it's changed recently, the official recommendation is to use the backup utility on your Mint install (which backs up data and notes your installed packages), then do a clean reinstall of Mint, then lastly run the backup utility to restore data and packages. You can do it the other way but the Mint project's resources are limited and success is not guaranteed.

That happened to me once. At that time I made some notes, so if it happened again I'd be able to recover easier.
Those notes are on Google Drive so I can get to them from any working device.

# to recover from a boot to blank screen (i think mine was all white)
# press "e" on grub screen to edit ubuntu boot command
# near end of "linux..." line after "splash" add " radeon.modeset=0"
# for me it booted to command line, not gui
# then startx gave me a "no screens found" error
# see http://community.linuxmint [linuxmint.com]

No, unless they just changed them, the instructions were to do a fresh install. They say if you want to try a upgrade in place, then they give you some steps (like changing to the proper apt repositories) to do, but they also let you know that YMMV and you're on your own if you hose it up.

--Sorry, I know Mint is one of the most popular distros and I'm a longtime user - but if you take a proper Debian base and modify it to the point where it can't be *upgraded* properly, YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG. I stopped using RPM-based distros exactly because of the upgrade headaches a long time ago.

--I went with Xubuntu this time around and haven't noticed the difference much - altho it appears to be much more stable than the last Mint(15/Olivia) I had on this laptop.

> For what it's worth, there were a lot of us that would have like to see the name> change. The staff even had a chance to override this decision, but instead we> decided to support the community's choice.

Yup. An obviously stupid name.

"But why?""Well, there was this stupid, forgettable film from the 1970s, where..""I know. But....but why?"

I hope not. The last (LTS) version of KDE Mint gave two errors after every install (one of which contained a typo). You had to disable some akoni-something nonsense or create an empty folder. Seriously. And the initial mandatory mint-update seemed to crash about half the time too.

Mint 17 Mate (released a couple of weeks ago; not sure why it's on the front page today; perhaps there are no Linus videos) "just works".

Will someone explain to me why I would choose "Cinnamon" or "MATE" or "Xfce" or "LXDE" etc etc etc?One would be for an old underpowered laptop, the other for a reasonably modern desktop.

It's really off-putting to hear how great Mint is, then go to the site and the first thing you need to do is decide which environment you will choose with no explanations of what that choice will mean to you. Are there programs that will only work under one environment and not the others? Are we just talking about difference

This is why I love virtual machines and broadband. Grab all the spins of Mint or whatever operating system that you're interested in and install them into virtual machines, then try them out until you're bored and delete the VM.

LXDE is for the really old computers, like the P4-based Celeron laptop my daughter uses.Xfce is for older computers or those with low specs, or if you want something faster than the next few:MATE is for those who remember GNOME 2 and the glory days of Ubuntu fondly. It's a continuation of the old GNOME 2 project.Cinnamon is the new thing that the Mint devs want to (eventually) replace MATE with. The interfaces are fairly similar but it's got more modern underpinnings.KDE is for the folks who want to customize ALL THE THINGS.

Generally they can run each other's programs, you'll just need the supporting packages to be installed, which your package manager should handle automatically when you install the program you want.

I like XFCE because it's pretty close to the classic Windows desktop but you can still twaddle around with the bars a little without it getting in your face (KDE). That it's pseudolightweight is just an added bonus.

I did a fresh install of M17 the day before yesterday. I had a couple of hard lockups running Cinnamon. LXDE was fine, and installing KDE is as simple as firing up synaptic and grabbing 'kde-standard'. I'm typing this from KDE right now. It's not as polished as SuSE's but it's stable (so far)

You must be one of those obnoxious kids running around with
paintcans spraying their ugly signature on arty things like statues.
Isn't is about time you for you to take off your diapers and put
on some real trousers,